People

The evolving platypus

A distinct society, perhaps becoming less so

WHO ARE TODAY'S Australians? Not yesterday's. Most of them are of either British or Irish stock, and the city centres still teem with Britons, who remain the biggest group of migrants. Even so, immigration from places other than the British Isles has transformed the nation. Over 26% of Australia's 22m population were born abroad, compared with 21% in Canada, 14% in America and 10% in Britain. And, until 2009, Australia was welcoming more and more people each year: net immigration (the definition is confusing) rose from about 160,000 in 2004 to over 300,000 in 2008, though two-thirds of those were classed as temporary migrants. Many, however, will eventually be given the right to stay, as thousands of students and asylum-seekers have been.

Watch our video-guide to Australia's past, present and future, or listen to an interview with the author of this Special Report

Immigration is good for the economy. Over the past 40 years population growth has been responsible for about two-fifths of the growth in real GDP. As Mr Eslake of the Grattan Institute has pointed out, without it Australia would have slipped into recession in 2008. Increasingly, the people admitted through its managed-migration programme bring skills that are in short supply in Australia. In an economy close to full employment—the jobless rate was 4.9% in April—this pleases business. The public at large are further reassured, it is said, by the knowledge that the system is orderly: targets are set and met, and the country benefits from a supply of trained people who come not just with qualifications but probably also some experience, often after waiting a few years to get in.

The country also has a humanitarian programme, which granted 13,000-14,000 resettlement visas a year to refugees and asylum-seekers between 2005 and 2009. The refugee visas are given to applicants abroad who are deemed to have a well-founded fear of persecution, in accord with the United Nations definition of a refugee. Asylum-seekers turn up without permission, sometimes in boats and nearly always after a long journey from places like Sri Lanka or Afghanistan, organised by professional people-smugglers. Most of the 944 people who arrived by sea in 2008-09 were found to be genuine refugees (indeed almost all asylum-seekers in the past three years have been allowed to stay), but boat people are often seen as queue-jumping economic migrants who, if accepted, might undermine the entire immigration programme.

That, at least, was Mr Howard's view. In an attempt to quieten a hysterical fuss about boat people, he adopted the “Pacific solution”, the interception of boats at sea and the removal of their human cargo to reception camps on distant islands such as Nauru. The policy went down well with some Australians but horrified others, and Mr Rudd changed it when he came to power, closing the camps on Nauru and Manus (in Papua New Guinea), though keeping that on Christmas Island, an Australian possession 1,550km north-west of Western Australia. These days Mr Rudd, who is now foreign minister, is hoping to persuade Australia's neighbours to act against the traffickers and thus stop the flow. China and Thailand are co-operative; and Malaysia has agreed to take the next 800 people to wash up on Australia's shores, in return for Australia's acceptance of 4,000 refugees from Malaysia in the next four years. This is meant to deter the smugglers. But since they have powerful friends in Indonesia, from which most boats set sail, it may not.

Immigration is a constant source of controversy. On the day in February that some boat people were burying relations who had drowned in a shipwreck three months earlier, Scott Morrison, the Liberal spokesman on immigration, attacked the government for paying for them to travel from Christmas Island to attend the funeral in Sydney. Poor timing, he acknowledged; others thought poor taste. The number of people arriving by boat last year, even after a huge increase on the year before, was only 6,535, and in the first quarter of this year 771 (when Lampedusa island, off southern Italy, received 15,000 in ten weeks). Most asylum-seekers arrive by air, yet politicians seldom mention them. The national terror seems to be of an attack by sea, though no maritime invaders have landed in Australia since the aborigines came some 40,000-80,000 years ago.

That net immigration has started to fall since 2009 (see chart 3) is one regrettable outcome of the fuss. The whiff of racism is all the more disturbing because in most other respects Australia seems rather free of xenophobia. There were nasty riots in 2005 in a suburb of Sydney, and some ugly attacks on Indian students in Melbourne last year. But generally race relations are harmonious, partly perhaps because for many years the main parties refused to make populist appeals. Now Labor and Liberals, with honourable exceptions, compete to pander to primitive fears about boat people, especially in suburban swing seats.

They do not, however, seek to exploit the plight of the main group to have experienced discrimination in Australia: its oldest inhabitants, the aborigines. Their position in society has been vastly improved by court judgments, notably the Mabo decision of 1992, in which the High Court recognised aboriginal title, rejecting the doctrine of terra nullius—the idea that Australia was empty when the Europeans arrived and the land belonged to no one. Some aboriginal groups now have considerable incomes from mining royalties. And the mining companies, having been intensely hostile to land rights, make great efforts to employ aborigines. Many other companies have initiatives of their own.

Saying sorry was nice, but not enough

The federal government has also had a change of mind. Under Mr Howard, it firmly refused to issue an apology to the “stolen generations”, the children taken away from their families by the authorities to be brought up by white Australians. Mr Howard argued that he could not take responsibility for the actions of people now dead (the policy, started in 1869, lasted until 1969). In 2008 Mr Rudd, soon after becoming prime minister, did make an apology, supported by the Liberal Party, which seems to have gone down well, especially among the indigenous population.

Much more controversial is a policy known as “the intervention”, started in 2007 by the Howard government and continued under Labor. It was a response to the horrifying incidence of child abuse among the indigenous population, the product perhaps of unemployment, drugs, drunkenness, family breakdown and despair. As well as banning booze and pornography, it quarantines part of welfare and other government payments to the inhabitants of 73 settlements so that the money can be spent on necessities such as food, clothes and health care for children. It is applied in the Northern Territory, which is home to about an eighth of the country's 500,000 or so aborigines. The intervention is criticised for its paternalism and its racially discriminatory nature. Many people, including the man who designed it, Mal Brough, say it has not worked. Yet many aborigines support it, because at least in some places it has made things better.

In truth, no single measure is going to achieve very much, and certainly not quickly. Lacking strong leadership, and divided about the best practical measures to pursue, the aborigines are now mainly seeking legal rights. They did not have full voting rights until the 1960s, and were not counted in the census until 1967. Ill treatment has bred suspicion, and aborigines worry that the statute law in which their rights are enshrined can be changed relatively easily, so they want some sort of recognition in the constitution. Though this document is less a declaration of lofty ideals than a manual on how to run a federation, it is not easy to change. Any amendment requires both a national majority of voters and a majority of voters in a majority of states (ie, four out of six). That has been achieved only eight times in 44 attempts.

The present government is committed to holding a referendum on this, partly because it is wanted by the Greens and an independent member of parliament, Rob Oakeshott, who help keep Labor in office. But whether it passes or fails may not matter much. What most aborigines need is improvements in low educational achievements, low life expectancy (17 years below the national average), high mortality among children and poor job prospects. The federal government, and all the states, have committed themselves in a “national partnership agreement” to moderately ambitious targets for all these ends. Money has been provided, and admirable principles laid out for achieving them. Unfortunately, the principles, which rightly call for full aboriginal involvement, are simply incompatible with the deadlines for achieving the targets.

Land of the white, brown and yellow

For all the official goodwill that now exists, and for all the gains that indigenous people have made in the past few decades, they show few signs of making the adjustments necessary for modern life, or even managing to move easily back and forth between their own society and the one that has grown up around them. As more is learnt about aboriginal culture, it is seen to be more subtle and elaborate than most non-aborigines had ever imagined. But many indigenous people still find it hard to thrive in modern Western society, and as they struggle many have lost crucial elements of their own world. Noel Pearson, a forthright aboriginal lawyer, argues powerfully for the need to provide indigenous people with the education to navigate in modern Australia; and for aborigines to acquire a sense of responsibility for their own lives. It is hard not to agree—and not to think this will be the work of at least a generation.

Non-aborigines, too, are changing. Australians remain a proudly sporting nation, which is why, although they rarely appear on the front pages of the world's press, they still feature frequently on the back ones. In the Olympic games Australia usually ranks high in the medal tables, especially if they reflect size of population. Yet tastes evolve, in sport as in any other sphere.

Sport is life, the rest a shadow

In football, the evolution seems curiously to reflect politics. All forms of football flourish in Australia, and especially rugby and Australian rules football. New South Wales and Queensland are the rugby states; Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory are strongholds of Australian rules football. This divide, argues Lindsay Tanner, a minister in Mr Rudd's government, reflects a division of political culture. Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart, the capitals of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, are “British” cities, where Labor made gains in the 2010 election. By contrast, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane, the capitals of New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, are “American” cities, where it fell back.

Tennis shows no such correlation. It is in decline. Australia used to produce plenty of tennis stars, but it is ten years since an Aussie won a grand-slam tournament. No Australian man has won his country's Open since 1976 and no woman since 1978. Cricket, too, has hit a bad patch. It had several great players four or five years ago, but few now. Perhaps, some suggest, consumerism, not sport, now defines the national character, with house prices and interest rates providing the way of keeping the score.

Perhaps consumerism, not sport, defines the national character, with house prices and interest rates providing the way of keeping the score

A growing materialism is certainly a trend identified by social analysts such as Hugh Mackay, the author of “Advance Australia…Where?”, who sees Australian society becoming ever more starkly stratified by money and at the same time less egalitarian. Even mateship, a quality Mr Howard wanted recognised in the constitution, is questioned, though good-neighbourliness was surely on show in abundance during the floods that afflicted Queensland and other places earlier this year.

Mr Howard claims Australia has a unique form of egalitarianism, and David Alexander, who used to work for Mr Howard's treasurer, recently argued in Policy magazine that Australia has developed a model of small-government egalitarianism that uniquely combines economic liberalism and egalitarian policy structures. Citing figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2010 Survey, he points out that, among rich countries, Australia had the lowest government spending and the lowest taxes. At the same time it ranked below average for income inequality and close to bottom for inequality of wealth, using the standard (Gini coefficient) measures.

Two factors, he says, contribute to these “fair dos” positions. One is Australia's system for making welfare and other transfers to the less well off, which is the most progressive in the world. The second is its tax system, one of the most progressive in the OECD. The upshot is what Mr Alexander calls a platypus model. Just like its egg-laying mammal, Australia defies the categorisers by being neither small-government and inequality-tolerant, as America is, nor high-taxing and egalitarian, as the Scandinavians are. This exceptionalism, believes Mr Alexander, makes Australia a happy and harmonious society in which populism is less likely and the chances for difficult reforms and real competition are better.

His analysis is consistent with plenty of superficial observations about Australia: the relative absence of conspicuous consumption (and, it has to be said, a certain lack of style in everyday dress); the evident democracy of the beach and the park; the practice of passenger and driver sitting side by side in taxis; the general amiability of discourse; the pervasiveness of a café society based, for the most part, on small enterprises producing their own excellent coffee (Australia, inventor of the “flat white”, has all but seen off Starbucks, which closed 61 out of its 85 Australian cafés three years ago, having found that anything it could do the Aussies were already doing better).

Australian society may have its ills, but it does seem pretty fair. Yet government spending as a share of GDP is expected to rise by mid-century, and Mr Mackay may have identified a trend. It is possible that the platypus model is passing its prime.